Seattle Start-Up Factory Hires Former Amazon and Microsoft Executive

Brian Valentine, a former Amazon and Microsoft executive, in the brick-walled loft inhabited by the incubator Ivy Softworks in Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood.Credit

SEATTLE – Ivy Softworks is a new start-up factory that has devised what its founder says is a better way to create tech companies. Now the plan has attracted Brian Valentine, a prominent engineer and executive who worked for years at Microsoft and Amazon.

Mr. Valentine recently joined Ivy as a managing principal, where he intends to help form the teams that will turn the firm’s ideas into products and companies. Ivy Softworks is the brainchild of Jordan Ritter, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Napster, the once-popular music service that ran into legal trouble.

Start-up incubators are not a new concept, of course. Traditional venture capital firms often employ “entrepreneurs in residence” to create fledgling companies. Mr. Ritter and Mr. Valentine said their singular priority was to hire entrepreneurial engineers, even if they do not come to Ivy with well-formulated start-up ideas.

“We tend to think about people first,” Mr. Valentine said in a recent interview in Ivy’s offices in a brick-walled loft in this city’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, “Incubators tend to think about products first.”

Mr. Ritter’s catchphrase for Ivy is “innovation studio.” It was born last year from seeing his initial start-up teams disintegrate and scatter to the winds as the companies matured. The older his start-ups became, the more they naturally began to focus on executing on sales and development plans rather than innovating, which was less satisfying to the founding teams, Mr. Ritter said.

Mr. Ritter said he found the separation particularly painful because he had moved a lot as a child and does not have much family. “When I built companies, I was building my families,” he said.

Ivy is attempting to solve the problem by giving its employees the ability to work on early stage projects then shift to new, unrelated projects as their previous efforts ripen into start-ups. The employees receive equity in any projects they work on, as they would in traditional start-up environments.

Ivy is working on several projects that Mr. Ritter wouldn’t discuss, except to say that they are in the area of “productivity and collaboration tools.” Mr. Ritter said Ivy was well-funded by prominent Seattle-area investors, including individuals and institutions, though he declined to name them.

The investors wanted Ivy to be near them in Seattle. Mr. Ritter said. He said he also prefers Seattle to the more crowded, aggressive start-up culture of San Francisco, where he was previously based.

“I feel a city in its ascendancy,” he said of Seattle.

When Mr. Valentine left Amazon in early 2014, he intended to retire and travel the world. Amazon’s chief executive recruited Mr. Valentine to the company in 2006, where he led the development of its e-commerce platform.

For 19 years before that, Mr. Valentine was one of the top engineering leaders at Microsoft, helping to introduce its blockbuster Exchange messaging product and leading Windows development for years. Mr. Valentine said he changed his retirement plans after hearing Mr. Ritter’s pitch for Ivy.